B S
Bhooshan
(This is the expanded/revised version of an essay in the book :+91 Residences, InCITE , Bangalore)
This note tries
to look at the viability of a plethora of ideas and designs put forward by many
architects and planners in the last 30 years who very romantically looked at
virtues of collective living as in villages and old settlements.. The most
prominently, were those promoted as part of HUDCO’ s cluster housing, the
Aranya project by BV Doshi or the Belapur housing by CM Correa and the new projects
like Ambivalley, Lavazza and many other gated communities. The inclusive housing
vs exclusive housing is a debate which never settles. There are many arguments
for and against these, but most importantly to note from documentations is that
all these ideas failed being anything beyond as successful only in miniscule
parts or as interesting photographs. There may be many reasons. I have no
intentions to go into that. But I think, a closer look at the idea of dwelling
itself may give some clues.
A house(1) is more than a set of spaces and features put
together. Its physicality is formed by a set of personal preferences and social
values and given a physical form and setting. But, what does a house mean in
India’s urban world today? What does it imply on its design?
The sense of place that a house offers is an
extension of the meaning derived from the multilayered identity that a house
along with its environment has. It is meaningful more to the inhabitants, than to
a visitor. One identifies oneself with a house and then to its surrounding ‘place’.
The structure of
power relations influences the manifest forms of houses and their relation to a
place most fundamentally, . Power derives from vanity and fear. Vanity is the
desire to be different and evolves from the idea of one’s identity- individual
or collective. Fear of many kinds, real
and imaginary, generates values for protection, or defense, which also promoted
collective living, once. Protection also generates power.
Stratification
and hierarchic position is not new to Indian society. Most people always belonged to a group, often inheriting
commonalities and sharing values, living collectively sharing resources that
suited the life styles. Most of the collective living in the past, the agraharas, the tols or the pols or the
row-housing streets were
based on a social stratification on the lines of caste or a vocation or trade;
a grouping dominated by‘segmentary differentiation’ ( term used by Luhmann cited
in Schumacher, 2011). Modernizing urban
societies are transforming towards a ‘functional differentiation’( again
to use a Luhmann term)(2) breaking original social stratification and
grouping to create new ones.
Collective
identities based on new criteria like income or status group change the meaning
of a dwelling or house. It becomes more of a value statement and life style
statement and also is a desire statement to belong to a status group. The individualisation of dwellings has
altered the sharing of resources even in the traditional areas like agraharas. Common social spaces are crumpling
and shedding original use and therefore, meanings. The collective idea now remains more
as a dream; not an achievable nor generally desired value, except in vanity- or-
social status- raising-situations like gated communities or high value
apartments. Here again, anonymity of urban life militates against a shared
collective culture and that denote a different meaning to a dwelling, perhaps
to a thing of convenience and economics.
The individual
house with a separate compound announced a status, a position and declared a
power relation with the rest of the society traditionally. A bungalow for a long time was reserved
for rich and feudal land lords or elite class who sought a different identity
and a different meaning deriving out of the affordable
voluntary exclusion , though partial, from the environment. Now that
desire of individuality runs across all seeking new status.
.
In the larger
cities, migration has been a major aspect in recent times. The proportion of
youth with investment capabilities is also on the rise. Investors therefore
look at abodes largely as temporary and go not seek much more. A minority who thinks
to settle down may seek greater meaning. They constitute what can be termed loosely as consumers of designer homes
or ‘ seekers’. As per McKinsey Report this class with annual income above two lakhs rupees as is less than 2% of the
urban population of India today (3). This denotes
that a significant part of urban population is struggling with day to day
living and attaches totally different meaning to a house. The trend making
media moulds the values and influences this minuscule ‘seeker’ class.
However, all classes of people tend to emulate the life styles
of ‘higher’ class and consider that desirable. This along with the desire to be different
propels the need for individual plots, however small. The resultant ever
decreasing size of plots leads to an inward looking self referential architecture
with communications to the street or to the neighbor totally broken. Meaning of
life around multifunctional streets and common social spaces collapses. Dwelling
becomes a property and goal is individual identity and projection of self. Is
collective living an unachievable utopia then?
New collective
identities may develop, perhaps, but not in the spatial sense of the past. The
increase of space-less, rootless, ‘ homeless’ nomads of global traveler class will assert more voices
in metropolitan landscapes. Functional and other groups defined by new life
styles, marked by high value gated communities for example, may physically segment
societal spaces.
The provision of
dwelling in large cities has become a simple technical economic exercise of how
to fit it physically and economically into an urban milieu. Architecture then
is a USP driven by notions of salability and economics compounded by reinvention
of nostalgic spaces and features, free cross-country adaption of invented
heritage features, mindless novelty seeking shape geometries and materials. Do
they have the quality to stimulate any deep experience for the inhabitants? If
not, the idea of community living is only a romanticized physicality or of temporary
experience. This problem solving approach fails to address the question of
human identity and ecologic meaning of dwelling in the evolutionary and
volatile urban societal context. What happened to Belapur housing or many less
known cluster housing ideas?
Can architecture,
as a discipline, search for resolving the dichotomy of self and its relations to the environment at large? When physical
space no more defines social groups, we may have to invent a new architecture
and a new idea of dwellings, housing and the city as an ecologic community. As
our social system is neither stagnant nor functionally as differentiated as in
the developed societies and still tradition coexists with the contemporary in an
uneasy way, we need, perhaps, an architecture and urban design different from
the past as well as the global. I am aware that it is a tall order, the first
step is to realise the current follies and learning from them.
Notes:
- The word house used here to mean the
physical expression of a home: a dwelling or an abode, which could be an independent
house, apartment or a street/row house. This essay is in the context Indian
cities only. It tries to understand the meaning of transforming
physicality of a house in the urban social context and its implication in
its design.
- Luhmann cited by Patrik Schumacher (2011), The Autopoesis of Archtecture, John Wiley and sons, West Essex.
- McKinsey Global Institute, (2010) India’s Urban Awakening, http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/reports/freepass_pdfs/india_urbanization/MGI_india_urbanization_fullreport.pdf
